


A Froggy Tale

by A_Diamond



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animal Transformation, Case Fic, Curses, Episode: s06e09 Clap Your Hands If You Believe, Fairies, First Kiss, Frog Cas, Getting Together, Light Angst, M/M, Soulless Sam Winchester, Tiny Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 16:03:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12868089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Dean knows it’s not aliens abducting people from Elwood, Indiana. He’s going to figure out what it really is, whether or not the eerily soulless version of his brother is willing to help. But when he follows some giggling lights into a forest that stretches far deeper than it has any right to, he stumbles into fairy magic he’s not sure he can escape from. Calling on Cas, instead of being the solution Dean hopes for, turns the situation from bad to worse. Because with Dean’s luck, things can always get worse.





	A Froggy Tale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delicious-irony (deliciousirony)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliciousirony/gifts).



> I fell in love with this art from the beginning, and I'm so glad I was able to claim it and work with the amazing delicious-irony! Getting to know you has been a blast, thanks for brainstorming and flailing and coping with me <3

“Wait, wait, be quiet,” Dean hissed into the phone.

He thought he could hear Sam rolling his eyes as he said, “Or I could just hang up. Dean, I have better things to do.”

“You just said you’re on the most boring surveillance you’ve ever had to sit through, what better things do you have to do?”

“I dunno, the waitress is kinda hot. Might do her. At least she looks desperate enough to make it not boring.”

If anyone had asked Dean at any other point in his life whether Sam could get more obnoxiously sulky than he’d been in his teens, he would’ve laughed his ass off. And also maybe decked them, depending on who it was; not everyone got to talk that kinda crap about his brother. But apparently the answer was yes, and Dean was getting pretty fucking sick of the soulless version of him. Who woulda guessed a soul could make so much difference?

“No,” he snapped. “You’ve got a job to do, so freaking do it. And seriously, shut up, I think I heard something,”

After a gusty sigh, Sam fell into an obviously annoyed silence and Dean could focus on what he’d heard deeper in the cornfield. It sounded like a laugh. A giggle, if it could even be called that, as tiny and high-pitched as a bell. It was weird, not quite childlike, not really like anything he’d heard before, but it definitely carried the amused waver of laughter with it. Then the noise doubled, another voice or whatever, just as shrill and buzzing.

Peering in that direction, he saw something flickering through the stalks.

“There’s something here,” he whispered. “There are lights in the cornfield.”

Sam didn’t respond.

“Sam?”

“Oh, sorry,” said Sam, not sounding sorry at all. “Am I allowed to talk now?”

“Sam!”

The giggling stopped for a second and Dean crouched lower, keeping a wary eye on the lights. Had he been too loud? But they didn’t move, and the laughter started up again, even more pronounced. It sounded like a third had joined them, maybe explaining the pause. They hadn’t caught on to Dean’s presence yet.

Still, he was quieter—if not any less annoyed—as he asked, “Any thoughts about what I might be looking at here?”

“You don’t think it’s the aliens?”

“Sam!” Dean had to struggle to get his voice back down. “Work with me here. The sooner we figure it out, the sooner we get to get the hell out of this flea market of crazy, right?”

Sam muttered something that sounded a lot like, “I’d still be stuck with you.”

Refusing to entertain the headache of calling him on it, Dean shook his head, rolled his eyes, and moved on. “I’m gonna go check it out. Stay put and let me know if your guy starts acting weird or anything, okay?”

“Uh huh.”

As Dean edged closer, the unnatural laughter picked up in pitch and speed.

“There’s three lights,” he told Sam. “Two purple, one white. Size of a baseball, maybe? They’re moving around a lot, like fireflies but huge.”

In an instant, all of Sam’s nonchalance vanished. “Huge fireflies? Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Dean stopped moving and hunkered down. The lights were only about three yards away now, still bobbing and giggling and apparently unaware of his presence. “Why, does that mean something?”

“Uh, yeah. There are, like, dozens of firsthand accounts from people who claim to have been abducted talking about lights like that.”

Inching closer, Dean asked, “And?”

“It’s literally the only thing that all the different stories have in common. First come the floating lights, then...”

It couldn’t be good if Sam-without-a-soul couldn’t even bring himself to say it. “Then?”

“Then anal probes. So many anal probes.”

“Oh, real funny.”

Dean ignored Sam’s laughter, which wasn’t as easy as he would’ve liked because it barely sounded like Sam anymore. Focusing on the other laughter, the tiny giggles coming from the floating lights, helped him push past it; even that was less unsettling than listening to Sam. The bright dots grew bigger as he got closer—well, no, but they _looked_ bigger as he got closer. Not in any weird way, thankfully. They weren’t any more or less bigger than they should have been. But they also hadn’t resolved into anything clearer than bright blobs of white or purple light.

When he was almost close enough to touch, the lights suddenly swirled together, giggling louder than ever, then sped away.

“Son of a bitch! They’re taking off!”

Dean took off after them, crashing through rows of corn and trying to keep the darting lights in sight. It was close enough to dusk that it wasn’t too hard to keep track, but they were fast little fuckers. They zipped and wove around the stalks without so much as rustling a leaf. And they didn’t stop laughing the whole time. He started to get the idea that they were laughing at him, and had been the entire time. Maybe it should’ve given him pause, but it didn’t worry him enough to overcome his irritation—at the lights, at the case, at Sam.

Neither did Sam saying, “You’re chasing them, aren’t you. That’s probably not the best idea you’ve ever had, you know.” He was back to sounding bored out of his mind, not like he actually cared about Dean’s ideas or well-being, so it was hardly a compelling argument.

“Yeah,” Dean huffed out as he ran, “I’m chasing them. People are vanishing, Sam, why would I not chase them?”

Sam sighed again. “Oh, I don’t know. If the fact that you have no idea what they are, what they’re doing, or how to kill them doesn’t deter you, then whatever.”

“Whatever,” echoed Dean, rolling his eyes. “There’s some trees coming up, looks like we’re heading that way. Southeast of the fields.”

“Sure, uh huh.” There was a sound like ice clattering in an empty glass, then Sam’s voice saying something quick that Dean couldn’t hear.

“Sam!” he barked, ducking a branch. “Are you listening? What did I just say?”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re chasing weird glowy balls into the woods because Dean Winchester fears no strange alien tools going up his butt, I got it.”

“Your obsession with butt stuff? Unhealthy, dude.”

“Really? Because I seem to remember that back when I, you know, had a soul and felt embarrassment, I walked in on you more than once with your fingers—”

“Zip it, Ice Queen!” Dean’s face burned, and not just because he was getting winded from running at nearly full speed over uneven ground. He would’ve been just fine never knowing that Sam had seen that. Desperate for a change of subject, he was almost grateful to realize, “Hey, something weird’s going on here.”

“Apparently. People are vanishing, Dean.”

“I mean right here, right now.” He slowed, still keeping the lights in his sight but letting them get a bit further ahead as he looked around. “There’s—okay, so it looked like just a line of trees when I was coming up to it, like I could see open space through it. But now this shit is just, it’s still going. There’s more trees than there should be.”

Sam made a thoughtful noise. “Oh, hey, I just remembered something. Ever heard of will-o’-the-wisps? They’re little glowy things that lure travelers to their deaths.”

“Really, you’re just telling me this—okay, you know, whatever. How do I gank them?”

“I don't know, Dean. I didn't bring my laptop to the bar and I'm using my phone to talk to you, so I can’t look it up on that.”

Slowing his pace further, Dean rubbed a hand through his hair and reconsidered. “Okay, okay. I’m gonna turn around, we can come back and look in the morning when—”

And then, between one step and the next, the world exploded.

Everything went dark and bright at once. He couldn’t see the three lights he’d been following anymore, but flashes of colors lit up and vanished around him, like some kind of twisted mix between a strobe light and being inside a disco ball, all while bunches of small jingling bells laughed at him. He might have been having a seizure or a stroke or something; he didn’t think it was a heart attack, because nothing really hurt, but there was an almost electric tingle spreading from his spine out to his fingers and toes. And his tongue, which was as strange as it was unpleasant.

Dean had been through a lot of weird crap in his life, had seen and experienced things that any normal person would be freaked the fuck out by. He wasn’t itching to relive any of it, but he liked to think he had some pretty good coping skills. Without them, he wouldn’t have survived so many years—decades—of hunting. He wouldn’t have survived all the monsters and demons and Hell. He was prepared for whatever the shitty supernatural world threw at him.

Except for suddenly being about the size of his own middle finger. The size his middle finger had been, when he hadn’t been the size of it. It had shrunk proportionally with the rest of him. Or maybe the trees, rocks, mushrooms, fallen leaves, dirt, and that one huge ant over there had all grown, but one of those things seemed more likely than the other and either way the result was effectively the same: Dean was tiny and things that should’ve been tiny weren’t.

“Uh. Sam?”

No answer. He lowered his phone, which seemed miniaturized along with him, away from his ear and looked at the screen. It was black and silent. No amount of or combination of poking buttons brought it back to life, so he was forced to the unfortunate conclusion that he couldn’t just blame Sam for hanging up on him. Whatever had zapped him, had killed his phone.

First things first. That giant ant was getting a little too close for comfort. Its entire existence was pretty uncomfortable, really, especially the relative size of its existence and Dean’s, but he’d feel a little better about it if the bug weren’t coming right for him. It wasn’t bigger than him, it wasn’t even a third of his size, but it scuttled toward him with a confidence he didn’t like the look of. It probably had friends nearby, and Dean remembered enough of Sam’s childhood obsession with Discovery Channel nature documentaries to know that just the one ant could probably cause him some trouble.

His hand found the grip of the gun at the back of his jeans, but hesitated there. Would it even work? Whatever had fried his phone might’ve zapped it into uselessness too, and even if not, he had no idea if it would fire at that size. Or how effective a bullet it fired would be.

He pulled it anyway. The next best option was kicking it in its shiny, creepy head, and he didn’t want to get into touching range of it if he could help it. The gun still fired.

His first shot went wild into the dirt—the recoil was off, lighter than he was used to—but it was near enough that the ant stopped and cocked its head to the side. The posture reminded him of Cas, though it looked odder on the insect than it ever had on his angelic friend. He found himself irrationally glad he hadn’t succeeded in killing it, especially when it scuttled away a moment later.

Cas; there was an idea. He didn’t need his phone to contact the angel—assuming Cas actually responded. There was no guarantee of that with Cas fighting his heavenly war against Raphael, flitting off who-the-fuck-knew-where, who-the-fuck-knew-when, not appearing to give a shit that Dean—that Sam and Dean needed him. Or that he needed them. They could help him, if he just gave them a chance.

Shaking off that bitterness, because if Cas was listening he didn’t need to hear it, Dean folded his hands and closed his eyes.

“Hey, Cas.”

He always felt a little ridiculous praying, especially after giving it up for so long and for such good cause. But saying it out loud helped for some reason. So did Cas answering instead of ignoring him, but that wasn’t something Dean could control, so he tried not to rely on it.

“I know you’re, uh, you’ve got a lot going on right now. But I’m in kind of a weird—bad weird, not funny—spot right now, and I could use some help. I don’t know what’s going on exactly, and I got no clue how I’m gonna get out of it on my own. So, yeah. If you could, know you, find the time. I’m in Elwood, Indiana in a forest near Little Duck Creek. At least, I think I am. The trees went a lot further in than they should’ve, and—”

The rustling flutter of CAs’s wings was soothingly familiar, even if it had been too long since Dean had heard it. He relaxed immediately, unaware he was doing it until his shoulders started to ache from the loosening tension. He was still tiny and still had no idea what had happened, but as far as aces in the hole went, his best friend the angel was a pretty good one to have.

Or at least, he thought so right up until instead of Cas, he saw another flash of light—in front of him, not around him. He blinked and rubbed the spots from his eyes to clear his vision, and after a few seconds he could finally see Cas. That was the good news. The bad news was that he hadn’t considered that Cas might also be hit by whatever had got him; Cas standing amid the mushrooms, exactly the same size as Dean, told him that he really, really should’ve considered that.

Cas’s eyebrows furrowed very slow as he processed the situation. “Dean,” he said, just as slowly, “this is a very disconcerting size to be.”

“Yeah, no shit!” Dean snapped. He wasn’t panicking, but he couldn’t exactly be thrilled at the turn things had taken. And maybe he was a little pissed at himself for not warning Cas away from the spot, if that was what had triggered it.

“Why are we—”

“Christ, Cas, I don’t freaking know! Here you not listening?”

“Of course.” Cas actually looked hurt at the question, which Dean didn’t think was fair. “I always listen when you pray.”

Now that was too much. “Yeah? Coulda fooled me, seeing as how we haven’t heard from you in—What was that?”

As he motioned Cas to silence, he heard it again: the giggling that had lured him there from the field. It was the same kind of quick, tittering laughter, but it didn’t sound tiny and distant any longer. That felt like a bad thing.

Before Dean could consider the implications of that and just how much he didn’t like them, a bright glow lit the horizon just beyond the tops of the mushrooms. The glow got brighter—closer—and resolved into three distinct lights. One white, two purple. The lights he’d chased into the woods. Only they weren’t the size of baseballs anymore.

Well, they probably were. But so was Dean.

The lights touched down on the far side of the circle, opposite Dean and Cas; both of whom were armed and tense, gun and angel blade ready for whatever was coming. As ready as they could be, anyway. But when the brightness dimmed enough for Dean to see through it, there didn’t seem to be an attack imminent. It was three figures, mostly human-looking, and they were too busy falling over each other laughing to do anything menacing.

Aside from their size, the least human thing about them was the fact that each one had a pair of colorful, butterfly-like wings fluttering behind them, nearly as tall as they were. Everything else about them—and Dean did mean everything, because they were totally naked and he could see it all—looked pretty normal. Not that that meant much, in the world of supernatural things.

Dean and Cas exchanged a look, then Dean inched forward—less-than-inched, whatever—and angled his gun at the female one nearest the front of the group. Her wings, a ringed pattern blue and purple, were almost neon enough to be painful to look at, and little glittery sparkles drifted off them as they shook with her laughter.

“What’s going on?” Dean demanded. “What did you do to us and how do we undo it?”

The three of them stopped laughing, eyed Dean and his gun, then looked behind him to Cas and started cracking up again. Several rounds of escalating threats from Dean accomplished nothing, and they still weren’t acting like an imminent threat, so Dean edged back to Cas and asked in an undertone, “Ideas?”

“Fairies,” Cas said in a growl.

Dean tore his eyes off the trio to stare at Cas incredulously, not sure he’d heard him right. “Fairies?”

“Fairies. This—” Cas indicated the ring of mushrooms around them, “—must be a fairy circle. The shrinking spell may be attached to it, so that anyone who passes through gets hit.”

“Not bad for a dumb angel,” crowed the male fairy. He had orange and white tiger-striped wings and a disproportionately long, slender—he was happy to see them, apparently. “Still dumb enough to fly right into it, but hey, no one’s perfect.”

Dean rounded on him, but Cas was faster. He stalked up to the fairies, blade glimmering in the light they still let off, and demanded, “You will reverse the magic.”

“Will we?” The fairies raised delicate eyebrows at each other and grinned. “Nah, I don’t think we will.”

“You will.” Cas advanced on the fairies in what Dean recognized as his most threatening manner; apparently they also recognized it as something like that, because the lead fairy flung out her hand and Cas slammed back into one of the mushroom stalks. His weapon fell from his hand and he grunted with the impact.

“Cas!”

Even though he wanted nothing more than to check on Cas with his own two hands and make sure he was okay, Dean knew that had to wait. First he needed to eliminate the threat, even if that meant they had to find another way to get themselves back to normal. But when he fired on the fairy who’d sent Cas flying, she waved aside the bullet like it was nothing.

He tried again, hoping to catch her by surprised, and could do nothing but curse as a shower of sequins exploded from his gun instead. Then he went crashing into a mushroom, too, pinned against the stem and unable to so much as twitch his fingers.

The fairy in the back, who had been silent up to that point, approached and studied them with a smirk that Dean didn’t trust at all. “You’re being exceptionally rude guests,” she said. “None of the others tried to hurt us after trespassing in our forest. They still had to be punished, of course; we just can’t have you forgetting about our customs entirely. A century or two of servitude at the court will see to that. But you two.”

Her teeth flashed like tiny daggers when she smiled. “Something special for you. Eenie, meanie, minie...” The finger she’d been flitting between the two of them pointed as Cas as she finished, “Moe.”

Sparks flying from her fingertip, the fairy drew a circle in the air between her and Cas. The lights hung in the air for a few seconds before she drew in a deep breath and blew them toward Cas, the round glow expanding as it approached.

Dean cursed and tried to twist, but the fairy’s magic held him immobile and he couldn’t turn to see what happened when the sparks hit Cas. He couldn’t even voice the worried yell that wanted to push up his throat.

The other two fairies were delighted by whatever it was she’d done to Cas, bursting out into more of the laughter that Dean was really sick of hearing.

“It’s perfect!” The other lady fairy clapped happily, which made little swirls of sparkle puff out from between her hands. “Do you think they’ll be able to break it?”

The apparent leader’s needle-sharp smile got even wider as she turned it on Dean and answered, “Not a chance. But if you do surprise me, little human, and break our curse in the traditional way, we’ll let you two leave our lands without further molestation. This time.”

Dean would’ve had some choice things to say to that if he’d been able. Since he wasn’t, all he could do was hang helplessly as the fairies lit up and spun away. Only once he couldn’t see any hint of their glow anymore did the magic fall away. Dean also fell, slumping to the ground as the force holding him up unexpectedly vanished.

Pushing up to his feet as soon as he registered it, he spun around to look at Cas.

The mushroom circle was empty. There was no sign of Cas on mushroom he’d been thrown up against, and Dean’s knees almost gave out again as he feared the worst. If the fairies had killed Cas—was it even possible? He was an angel, after all. But the fairy magic had been able to shrink him and to hold him back, so maybe it could.

Then again, the fairy had said “you two” when she was villain-monologuing at Dean, and that had been after the spark thing. There was no one she could’ve been talking about other than him and Cas, so Cas wasn’t dead and Dean had to find him.

“Cas?” he called. No one answered. “Cas!”

Something made a weird noise behind the mushroom in question, and Dean swung around to see—a frog. It clung to the stem, about as tall as he was with its legs stretched, and it was a very familiar shade of blue. He’d know that color anywhere, had spent so much time staring into eyes that looked just like it.

Peering at the frog, he asked, “Cas?”

The frog croaked back at him.

“Shit.”

He hadn’t thought his night could get any worse after he’d been zapped tiny. Then he hadn’t thought it could get worse after Cas also got zapped. He’d learned his lesson. He was tiny, Cas was a tiny frog, and everything was going to keep getting more terrible. Oh—and Sam had no soul and probably wouldn’t come looking or be any help at all.

It turned out to be for the best that he’d braced himself for Murphy’s Law; just about the second he accepted it, Cas-the-frog gave another low ribbit and jumped away. He made it an impressive distance with that one leap, clearing the circle and about half of Dean’s very limited sight distance.

“Cas! What the fuck?” Dean started after him, then reconsidered and doubled back to snatch up his gun first. Maybe it would work, maybe  it would just shoot more damn sequins, but having it was better than the alternative. By the time he turned to Cas again, the shiny blue skin of his friend was nowhere in sight.

“Cas!” he yelled again. “Damn it, Cas!”

Leaves shifted in the distance. They were more or less in the last direction he’d seen Cas, and it was the best thing he had to go on, so he took off after it. Running over the forest ground in the dark was even harder when he was barely taller than some of the branches he had to jump over, and his hands and arms got scraped to shit in the process, but it was worth it when he ducked around a newly sprouted fern and saw a flash of blue.

“Cas, come on, dude. Wait!”

Cas turned to regard Dean, head tilted to the side. He blinked, as far as Dean could tell, his eyes kind shrinking in closer to his head as something filmy came up to cover them.

“Okay, that’s just freaky,” Dean told him. But at least he held still while Dean caught up to him, and even hopped in the right direction when Dean nudged him and said, “Let’s get out of here. Maybe, if we’re really lucky, we can get to Sam and convince him to pull his head out of his ass long enough to help us figure something back out. I think the field’s back this way, come on.”

Cas let Dean lead him in a leapfrog sort of way, hopping ahead of Dean and then waiting for him to pass before jumping ahead again. They made it a decent distance—Dean had no idea how far, couldn’t estimate even vaguely how far they’d gone or how much further it was—before Cas tried to wander off in a totally different direction again. Cursing Cas, the fairies, magic, and the whole situation in general, Dean sprinted after him and had almost caught up when he got caught up instead.

A large hand closed around him and lifted him up; way, way up.

“I don’t even mind not banging that waitress anymore,” Sam said when Dean was level with his huge face. His voice sounded strange, deeper than usual, but the words were still recognizable. “This is fantastic.”

“Sam! You found us! How did you—”

It occurred to Dean with a sick jolt that Sam didn’t know Cas was with him, wouldn’t recognize the frog that Dean could no longer see since he was too far off the ground.

“Cas! The frog!”

Sam stared at him blankly—more blankly than normal for him since losing his soul—and Dean jerked one arm out from Sam’s grip to wave at the ground.

“There’s a small blue frog, small for you, not me, down near where you grabbed me. Or he was. That’s Cas, you need to grab him before he gets away. I don’t know how much he knows or remembers.”

The world spun again as Sam lurched him around to crouch down and peer at the ground. Though he did seem to be looking, he was also laughing almost as much as the damned fairies had. “Cas is a frog,” he repeated. “You’re, like, three inches tall and Castiel is a frog.”

“Yes,” Dean growled back. It probably wasn’t particularly intimidating in his current state, but it felt better than not doing it. “I’ll explain later, just grab Cas and get us the hell out of here.”

“Aha!”

Sam darted his free arm forward, rattling Dean yet again. When it came back into view, he had Cas trapped within his giant fingers. Cas’s legs flailed in the air, and Dean, maybe a little panicked, snapped, “Be careful! Don’t squish him, jeeze.”

“Oh, calm down.” When Sam stood up, it gave Dean the worst kind of airplane flashbacks. “I’m not gonna kill Cas. This is too funny.”

“No, it’s not! This is a big fucking problem, Sam.”

Sam snickered. “Seems like a tiny fucking problem to me.”

“Oh shut up. Just get us back to the damn hotel.”

As if Sam mocking him for getting shrunk by fairies wasn’t bad enough—“Fairies, Dean? Fairies. You’ve been cursed by glowy, naked fairies.”—the fact that Dean’s set of keys for the Impala had shrunk in his pocket and he had no choice but to let Sam drive stabbed at his already mangled pride.

Plus, poor Cas had to ride in the glove compartment, because he wouldn’t stop hopping around the car and making Sam almost swerve off the road. With laughter. Dean kind of hated his brother just then.

Back at the room, Sam stuck Cas under a glass on the table while he worked on his laptop and Dean paced.

“You’re sure he can breathe under there?” Dean asked, resting a hand against the cup. After a few minutes of bumping his face and various limbs against the container, Cas had settled down and stopped moving at all—except for the barely noticeable rise and fall of his back. So he was breathing, but Dean’s concern was whether he would keep breathing, if he was getting enough oxygen in there.

He was pretty sure frogs still needed oxygen.

“Yeah, Dean.” As distracted as Sam sounded, focused on whatever he was reading about fairies, he still found the time and energy to roll his eyes. “He’s as fine as he’s going to get while staying a frog. Now stop bugging me if you want me to get anything useful. You’re the one who actually cares about this.”

Dean licked his lips, trying to give himself time to think before reacting badly, but it didn’t work. “You don’t care? You don’t fucking care if we’re stuck like this?”

Sam, infuriatingly, shrugged. “That’s not news. I don’t care about anything. I mean, really, Dean, if it were up to me I’d leave you like this until it stopped being hilarious. And I bet that would be a long time.”

“Great. That’s just fucking great, Sammy—”

“Ugh, shut up. I’m doing it, aren’t I? But I’ll put you in a little glass prison of your own if you don’t stop being so completely obnoxious.”

Dean clenched his jaw, but he wasn’t happy about it. As soon as he was back to normal, he owed Sam a fat lip on principle. Since he wasn’t in a position to dole out justice as he was, he settled for seething and sitting next to Cas’s glass. He hated feeling useless on a hunt. Being responsible for Cas getting benched not just from the hunt, but all his Heaven crap? Well, he couldn’t think of a time when he’d felt worse.

“We’ll figure it out,” he promised Cas too quietly for Sam to hear. “I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get you back, okay?”

Cas didn’t react. Maybe he couldn’t understand, or maybe he was just doing a zen thing until he was back to normal. Dean couldn’t tell, so he’d have to ask when—not if—he could talk again.

“I’ve got it,” Sam announced a few minutes later. “I think this’ll work.”

Scrambling to his feet, Dean climbed onto the edge of the laptop and tried to read the page Sam had landed on. The screen was too bright and blurry, it just gave him a headache. Looking up at Sam instead, he demanded, “What? What is it?”

“A banishing spell. It says it removes ‘fairies and their latent magics’ from—wow. This should cover most of the state, actually.”

“Great,” Dean said reflexively. Then it really hit him. “Great! Yes, okay, do that, can we—what do we need, can we do it now?”

Without warning, Sam shut the laptop; Dean barely got out of the way in time to avoid getting hit. Then he tipped Dean backward so he landed on his back on the table and covered him with a giant hand, smothering Dean’s disgruntled complaint.

“I’m gonna go get what I need and do it, yeah. You’re gonna stay here because I don’t want to deal with carrying you around when you’re as useful as a little girl’s dress-up doll. And just as likely to get lost or broken.”

Snarling, Dean shoved at the palm holding him down. It accomplished nothing except maybe proving Sam’s point, so he gave up and slumped back against the wood until Sam relented and lifted his hand, eyebrows raised condescendingly.

Dean turned his head to glare at the closed computer instead of Sam’s stupid, smug face. “Fine,” he snapped. “Just get it done.”

Sam smirked, then scooped Dean up in one hand and tossed him onto the bed. Dean’s yell as he flew through the air might not have been entirely manly, but he dared anyone to do better; it was fucking terrifying and he was going to kill Sam when it was all over. Get his soul back, then kill him.

Next, Sam carried Cas over with considerably more care, one hand covering the mouth of the glass to keep him from escaping, and set it on the bed next to Dean. “Don’t want you breaking the table if this works,” he said.

Dean snapped, “When this works. And you couldn’t have carried me, too? Or, like, put us both on the floor? This is not a bed I wanna share with another grown-ass man, Sammy.”

“But there are other beds you would?”

“That’s not what I—It’s a tiny fucking bed! And why is Cas still under that glass, what it if he can’t get out or it breaks and hurts him or—”

“Those sound like problems you can deal with.” Sam waved a negligent hand and turned his back on Dean, heading out. “This shouldn’t take long.”

“Fuck you, Sam!” Dean yelled after him. He doubted the sentiment made it through the closed door, but it was still worth doing. “I’m gonna kill him,” he told Cas. “Just gonna kill him.”

Getting the glass up off of Cas was a bitch and a half. Because of course, Sam had chosen one of the tall kind, not just a tumbler that would’ve held Cas just as well, and that meant it was bigger than Dean and probably heavier, too. He tried tipping it, but that mostly just made it sink a little deeper into the crappy polyester covers on the opposite side, and he couldn’t get it high enough for Cas to squeeze under.

Finally, exhausted after countless failed attempts, he fixed Cas with a tired glare and asked, not actually hoping for a response, “A little help here?”

Nothing. Typical.

“Okay. Fine. If this doesn’t work, you can just sort your own shit out and hope shitty motel drinkware doesn’t have unexpected effects on magic.”

Bouncing a few steps away, Dean got a running start and slammed his shoulder into the side of the glass as hard as he could. It hurt more than ramming any door ever had, but his shoulder didn’t dislocate and the glass finally toppled to the side and rolled a few inches before the blanket stopped it. It worked.

Cas was free.

He celebrated this freedom by giving a loud, resounding croak, then hopping off the bed.

“Cas!”

Honestly, Dean should’ve expected it.

Telling himself it was only to make sure that there was no blue, frog-shaped splatter on the carpet, Dean made the unreasonably difficult trek to the corner of the bed and peered over. No squished Cas. No any kind of Cas, so he was undoubtedly jumping around the room like a dumbass and Dean couldn’t even get off the bed safely, much less catch him. Fine. Not like there was anything he could do about it, so he turned around and made himself a nice little dent near the center of the bed to lie in.

No point falling off the edge when he grew back to normal size.

An excellent decision that came just in time, too. He’d only barely considered closing his eyes and trying to catch a nap when light burst all around him, and then he had to close them. It still left spots dancing behind his eyelids, but he didn’t mind. Because when he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was the ceiling, and it looked a lot closer. Then his feet, which hung off the edge of the bed—he’d miscalculated a little, but not much—and his legs which took up a normal amount of space on the mattress.

“It worked! Goddamn! Good job, Sammy! It worked!”

Maybe he wouldn’t kill him.

Sitting up made him briefly dizzy again, but he had to look around and find...

Nothing. Cas wasn’t there.

“Cas? If you ditched me, I swear to your Heavenly Father I’m gonna—”

A small noise interrupted him, familiar enough that it damn near broke his heart. It was a tiny croak from a tiny blue frog, looking up at him from the floor with his head cocked to the side. Dean scrambled down, dropping to his knees and trying to pick Cas up, but the sudden movement must have startled him and he leaped out of range.

Dean followed, slower, tried to telegraph his movements and explained, “I just wanna take a look at you, buddy. See if I can figure out why you’re stuck, what we need Sammy to do. Okay?”

But Cas just jumped away again. And again. Dean was still chasing him around the room, trying to get him to “hold still for one goddamn second you pain in my ass, if I find out you’re doing this on purpose—” when Sam opened the door, took in the scene, and cracked up.

“Close the door!” Dean grunted at him, diving for Cas and finally getting a hand around him that he didn’t slip out of. “Fucking finally. Why’d you let Sam pick you up no problem, huh?”

“Maybe he was lying about the profound bond,” Sam suggested. “Maybe it’s really with me.”

It was a joke, a stupid and easy joke, but it hurt a lot more than Dean would’ve thought it could. What he and Cas had—What he and Cas had was a problem. “He’s still a frog.”

Sam snorted. “No shit. Anything you forgot to tell me?”

Cradling Cas between his palms, Dean sat on the bed and considered. “I don’t think so. I went into the forest after the fairies—”

Sam snickered and Dean flipped him off with his top hand.

“—and got hit with the shrinking spell or whatever when I went into the mushroom circle.”

“There’s a reason they’re called ‘fairy circles,’ Dean.”

“Shut up. I prayed for Cas, Cas showed up but he was also in the circle so he got shrunk. Then the fairies showed up, bitched about stuff, and turned Cas into a frog.”

“So him turning into a frog was separate? Not just part of what the circle did to him?” Sam sat back in the chair he’d been using and opened the laptop again. “I wonder...”

“Yeah. The lead fairy chick, she turned him into a frog. Then the other one asked if she thought we’d be able to break the curse, and—”

Groaning, Sam shot him an aggrieved look. “You didn’t say it was a curse. Curses are different than latent fairy magic, Dean. You got hit by the fairy circle spell, but if Cas had a specific curse laid on him, it probably still needs to be broken. Did they say anything about how to do that? What I’ve found says they usually like to give riddles or something.”

“No. Fuck.” Dean almost ran a hand through his hair, then remembered he shouldn’t let go of his cargo and rolled his neck instead. It didn’t do much to ease the stress. “Just that if I broke it, we could leave.”

“But she didn’t say how?”

“She...” Dean thought back. “She said something about ‘the traditional way,’ that’s it.”

All his activity on the laptop ceasing, Sam turned to face him full-on and repeated, “The traditional way. You’re sure that’s what she said?”

“Yeah.”

Dean had no idea what the hell was so funny about that, but it must have been something because Sam lost it again. He laughed so hard he bent over the table to hold himself up; he laughed so hard tears streamed from his eyes. It was more emotion than he’d ever seen out of his soulless brother, and more merriment than he’d seen out of his actual brother in a long, long time. That realization hurt, but not enough to distract him from his goal.

“What? What the hell is so funny, do you know what that means?”

“Yeah,” Sam gasped out. “Yeah, I do. You don’t?”

“Obviously. What, Sammy?”

Sam took a deep breath, straightened, and grinned at him. “True love’s kiss.”

“What.”

“That’s the traditional method of breaking curses, especially fairy curses. Cas needs to be kissed by his one true love.”

Anger overtook Dean and he scowled. “Is this a fucking joke to you, Sam?”

“I mean, kind of. But it’s also the truth.”

“He’s an angel! He doesn’t have a true love.”

“He’s a frog,” Sam pointed out blithely, “and apparently he does. The fairy thought you could break it, remember?”

The denial was instant and unconscious. “No. No, just because I—” He hadn’t meant to admit that. Face hot, he dropped his gaze to his cupped hands and prayed Cas really couldn’t understand.

Sam scoffed. “Oh, whatever. First of all, it’s not like I give a shit. Second of all, I’m pretty sure I knew that even back when I did give a shit. And third, if Cas isn’t stupidly in love with you—emphasis on stupid, for both of you—then he’s got a really weird way of showing it.”

“You think—” Dean glanced up at Sam, licked his lips, looked back down at the slivers of blue peeking between his fingers. “You really think so?”

“Or I’m just saying it to shut you up and get you to humiliate yourself with a frog. Does it matter? You’re going to get disgustingly emotional and then do it anyway no matter what I say. I’m going to take a shower, figure your shit out before I get back.”

As the bathroom door slammed shut and the water started up, Dean slowly opened his hands and looked down at Cas. Cas looked back up, blinking unnervingly, and didn’t try to escape.

“Okay,” Dean said, “okay. I’m gonna—I don’t know if I’m your true love, dude. I—I don’t deserve you, not you. But I’m pretty sure you’re mine, because I love the fuck out of you, Cas. I’m never gonna stop loving you. So maybe that’s enough. God, I hope it’s enough.”

With one final deep breath to steel himself, Dean raised his hands to his face, pursed his lips, and—

“Dean,” Cas said from behind his right shoulder, “what are you doing?”

Dean’s whole body startled at the shock, which meant his hands flew up and Cas went flying and Dean shot to his feet. “Cas! Shit, Cas—wait.”

Slowly, disbelieving, Dean turned his head and there, six-foot-whatever and wearing a dirty trenchcoat and not at all blue was his Cas. The frog rumbled an angry croak from the corner where it had landed. The frog that was... not Cas.

“Cas?”

“Hello, Dean. Why were you about to kiss that frog?”

“Uh.” Dean scrambled for a good excuse, came up with nothing, and asked, “What frog?”

It was probably his fault. He’d probably accidentally thought things couldn’t get worse again. That would explain why Cas raised an open palm and the not-Cas frog appeared in it.

“This frog.”

“I wasn’t—I—fuck. I thought it was you, okay? I thought you were still under the fairy curse and Sam said you needed to be kissed to break it so I was gonna try and kiss you.”

Cas hummed thoughtfully. “I did wonder why you had Sam pick up that frog instead of me,” he said after an agonizing moment. “But I couldn’t exactly express my complaints.”

Collapsing on the bed, Dean covered his face with his arm and laughed. The only other option was crying, and that would probably come later. “This whole time, it was a different frog.”

“Yes. I was returned to normal some time ago, I assume the same way you were.”

“Sam banished the fairies,” Dean muttered into the crook of his elbow. “Why’d you wait so long to come here?”

The bed sagged as Cas sat beside him. “I didn’t know where you were. I could safely assume that Sam had taken you back to the motel, but there are a lot of motel rooms in Elwood. I had to check most of them before I found you.”

Dean sighed. “Right. Great.”

They sat there—lay there, in Dean’s case—for a long time with only the running shower to fill the silence. For possibly the first time, Dean found himself wishing Cas would just vanish without another word and save him from more humiliation. Luck still wasn’t on Dean’s side.

“You thought the frog was me, under a fairy curse. So you were going to kiss me?”

“Do we have to go over this again?”

“Dean.”

Cas’s voice was grave enough that Dean forced himself to sit up and look. Whatever was coming, he could hide and get weepy or he could take it like a man. And get weepy later.

“Yeah, Cas?”

“Kissing only breaks a curse if it’s true love’s kiss.”

The tears burning his eyes could wait until Cas had fucked off back up to Heaven. “I know. I had to try, even though I knew it wouldn’t—”

“It would.” Cas’s hands, sans frog, came up to cup Dean’s cheeks. They were soft and warm, drawing him in close, and Dean forgot to breathe in the time it took Cas’s lips to brush his. He remembered as soon as they touched, gasping into what felt like an electric shock and breathing Cas instead of air. It was so much better.

He knew Cas was right; it would’ve worked, because only a true love’s kiss could feel as magical as what they shared. And he knew, would be sure to remember for the rest of his life, that no matter how bad things got; they could always get better.

“I’m getting my own room,” Sam announced overly loudly; Dean hadn’t even noticed him coming back from the bathroom. He rolled his eyes at them and left wearing nothing but a towel around his waist.

Dean laughed, then kissed Cas again. It was still just as perfect.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Of Frogs And Mushrooms](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12868824) by [delicirony (deliciousirony)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliciousirony/pseuds/delicirony)




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